Antonio. And stand indebted, over and above, Portia. He is well paid that is well satisfied; -From Shakespeare's Comedy. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Shakespeare is, above all writers, at least, above 10 all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpracticed by 15 the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions 20 or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply and observation William Shakespeare. will always find. His persons act and speak by the influ25 ence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. It is from this wide extension of design that so much 5 instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestic wisdom. It was said of Euripides that every verse was a precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare that from his works may be collected a system of civil and economical pru- 10 dence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendor of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable and the tenor of his dialogue. Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, by whose power all good and evil are distributed, and 15 But love is only one every action quickened or retarded. of many passions; and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that 20 any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity. This, therefore, is the praise of Shakespeare, that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in following the phantoms which other writers raise up before him 25 may here be cured of his delirious ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world, and a confessor predict the progress of the passions. Shakespeare's plays are not, in the rigorous and critical sense, either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, 5 mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveler is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the 10 malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another, and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design. Shakespeare has united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only in one mind, but in one composition. 15 Almost all his plays are divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and laughter. That this is a practice contrary to the rules of criticism will be readily allowed; 20 but there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature. The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. That the mingled drama may convey all the instruction of tragedy or comedy can not be denied, because it includes both in 25 its alternations of exhibition, and approaches nearer than either to the appearance of life, by showing how great machinations and slender designs may promote or obviate one another, and the high and the low coöperate in the general system by unavoidable concatenation. — Dr. Samuel Johnson. |